Democrats consider the people as the safest depository of power in the last resort; they cherish them, therefore, and wish to leave in them all the powers to the exercise of which they are competent.

The impious presumption of legislators and rulers, civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.

I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves.

The government you elect is the government you deserve.

Our wish is that...[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.

No society can make a perpetual constitution... The earth belongs always to the living generation.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.